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Family Circus, 8/9/24

“Steve Tracy” here annoys me so much, because it feels like I’m supposed to know who he is, and despite being the Comics Curmudgeon I do not waste my valuable and declining brain cells on non-Keane Family Circus characters, OK? I guess he’s supposed to be one of Billy’s little friends, who in general don’t seem to recur as characters, possibly because Billy is pretty off-putting. Anyway, Billy, did you know that the Olympics are in France? Do you think “Steve Tracy” or any of your other shitty little friends have the financial resources or cultural savvy to go to France? What a frankly ludicrous notion.

Blondie, 8/9/24

Say what you will about Dagwood Bumstead, but he is a man capable of truly herculean feats of gastronomical engineering, routinely constructing improbably enormous sandwiches and stacking rows of plates up his arms for easier transport. The fact that he’s capable of expressing such cartoonish excitement about the fact that Blondie has arranged five eggs in a vaguely Olympic rings-shaped tableau on a serving dish just proves that he’s as down bad for her as he ever was, which after all these years is honestly quite sweet.

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Dustin, 7/29/24

Absolutely one of the most heartbreaking things about Dustin is that Dustin’s dad is a cruel asshole who will never love his son, and Dustin is a contemptible slacker who will never get his life together in a way that might cause his father to feel a shred of affection for him, but Dustin still wants his father to love him. Look at his face in that first panel: he knows that he’s figured out how to get his father to talk shit about some imaginary stupid young people who exist in his mind, rather than about his actual son, to his son’s face.

Hi and Lois, 7/29/24

The LIBERAL COMMUNISTS at PBS want you to spend your 6 o’clock hour like Hi in panel two: getting Ludovico techniqued from watching 60 uninterrupted minutes of war crimes. But your patriotic friends at the commercial networks know what you really want: 41 minutes of actionable News You Can Use and 19 minutes of ads for new breakthrough pharmaceutical products to ask your doctor about, which are also a kind of news you can use, if you think about it!

Family Circus, 7/29/24

Ha ha, YES Jeffy, you’ve got him dead to rights for unpatriotic thoughtcrime, time to have him sent to the reeducation camps and you’re FREE

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Gearhead Gertie, 7/18/24

Frank Sinatra died in a hospital with his wife by his side, which, when it comes to ways to die, is not the worst by any means. But consider: what if instead he had died onstage because he sang a song that was far too dangerous and lost control of it, while thousands of his fans looked on, horrified but deep down inside thrilled, because isn’t the possibility of death, no matter how slim, just the far edge of the same space of drama that brought them there in the first place? Obviously that’s not what pulls in concertgoers, that’s not really what live music is about, but also that’s why Gertie is still robust and full of energy, feeding on the visceral noise and violence and risk of NASCAR, and her husband is a pencil neck listening to his little records, a man whose requests to fly a giant Sinatra flag out front once in a while have been repeatedly nixed.

Family Circus, 7/18/24

Look, you can try to prevent your children from learning anything about sex and reproduction all you want, but eventually, in the absence of information, they will try figuring out how it all works on their own from whatever they can glean from their environment, and the results will honestly be much more disturbing than you can imagine.